Wikia launches

Ah, who am I kidding. You don’t want to hear me talk about the Davos question. I know that webmasters and search engine optimizers alike are all over at Wikia taking it for a test drive. I’m sure that SEOs are trying to figure out how this scoring:

means that a site ranks highly for viagra. That’s cool. I’m over on Wikia testing it out tonight as well. Maybe I’ll see you over there:

Wikia is catching some initialnegative reactions, but I think this is one of those projects where it will take time to see how Wikia’s search experience develops. So my reaction is pretty simple: congrats to the Wikia crew on your public launch, and welcome to the search industry! I’m glad that you’re jumping into the search space.

Good to see some (more) interactivity coming to search engines. I tried to evangelize a little bit to get people onto CSE / COOP, but for most people it is easier to complain about spammy results than working together to get things better. If wikia does a good job (or gets more of us to invest some time and KNOLs) the search engines will grow to the next level.

It surely introduces some new and interesting ideas to search, and it’s obvious that it will take time, users’ data and experimentation till Wikia figures out what are the right mix for a next-gen search.

Andrew: I disagree, IMHO is the idea great but the technology not ready. Human powered search is something Google plays around with, too. We saw feedback forms and the team of matt is occasionally killing spam sites manually. The human factor can be powerful, but not on the usual paths of a robot reading the web and trying to factor in some feedback. So, your critics are right: “easy to game”, “does not scale well”, but the concept behind is OK it is just the question how you solve these negative aspects!

Good to see you promoting the competition? And yes we do need another search engine, I am not down on google – I do well from them as do many others, but it is just like Pepsi needs Coke – and honestly two just feels a bit safer.

Matt,
Try to search for Viagra on that Wikia and you shouldn’t be too surprised whose picture you’ll find there. After all, you need some stimulants to be having a love affair with some many webmasters every day 🙂

Tim Wintle, yes, I believe this version is based on Nutch. I’m not sure whether a bunch of informational retrieval-savvy SEOs will make a huge difference or not, but I’m certain that some SEOs are brushing up on phrases like “IDF”. 🙂

Dave Dugdale, I’m more just getting a feel for the engine than doing anything much. I’m glad that someone is trying out this idea, and competition is good for users.

I doubt that anybody gets it right the first time. Be patient to see what develops. The only concern I have about a human edited search engine is, with so much content and so few professionals, how can they possibly remain impartial, even when great information makes it’s debut? Such a search engines dependency on human interaction could essentially be a crutch.

Looks like a school project for now but there are some interesting ideas there. I especially like to see how they’d implement the user voting mechanism – their weight on ranking and the huge challenges to control abuse, for example. Liked the popup though: ” Sorry. These don’t actually do anything yet 🙁 “

I am not too enthused about this Wikia and all the uproar about Wikipedia. Everything is biased. Whenever I do a search on certain things, Google gives top priority to Wikipedia’s content. Content, content, content, and the relevancy of the content. It is quiet clear that neither Machine alone nor Human alone, can make the search truly “Organic”. My question is “WHY DO WE NEED WIKIA?” It is clearly another SPAM tool.

Left is too controlling, right is virtuous, but extreme right is like coming full circle to the left, feeding what it deemed to be the right information. Think about it!!!

I actually the design, looks fresh and clean. I really wonder where Wikia will stand after a few months. Seems to me they still have quite some work to do, but look at where wikipedia stand at this very point.

Wikia has one major problem. I would argue that it needs to be even more relevant than Google to make any kind of impact. Not just as relevant or slightly more relevant. It needs to be an order of magnitude more relevant than the current top-tier contenders.

Here’s why. Obviously if you aren’t as good as Google or even Yahoo, people will just use Google/Yahoo. MSN and ASK proved that much already. However, since this is a Wikipedia-related endeveour, it’s got an even bigger monkey on its back. Wikipedia is easy, concise, and seems fairly accurate to the average user. Trying to piggyback on the Wikipedia brand is ok, except that if you aren’t simple, relevant, and concise you aren’t going to win anything. You’ll be an also-ran much the same way that Ask is.

You don’t even have to look at spam keywords to find ridiculous results in Wikia. Look up George Washington on there and you’ll get a top 10 result about George Washington in Barbados from a Barbados MFA site. Sure, the results are bound to get better, but I don’t see Wikia replacing any other engine anytime soon.

Speaking of new kinds of search results .. when did Google start showing a page of ads before the organic results for site searches? Seems very inappropriate to me. Certainly useless, considering the point of searching for “keyword site:domain.tld” is to return results from that domain, not from ads. What’s going on?

After some tests with Wikia I am mostly disappointed not only with the Quality (that will improve) but with the Processes in the backend. I see the same methods like in Wikipedia: non transparent deletions, low communication skills and the bad feeling to work for free for somebody who earns money with this venture.

You can’t call this a big project, get a few servers install nutch and let it roll, not exactly the largest feat in the world now is it? They don’t even include Host grouping damn it! Its just a lazy attempt at a search engine, mocked together with a half decent design and features aren’t working, Japanese characters are showing for a ton of searches (broadly).

The hype, was just that! Hype, nothing is custom about this, the rating would of been something original, had it worked……

Looks like the Wikia approach involves building a whole new community in order to build up the relevance of search results. Instead of starting on a clean slate, how about leveraging on the current leading social bookmarking communities (e.g. del.icio.us) to enhance the combined metasearch results from the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! Search, Windows Live Search)?

We’ve just launched a web search service called
FuzzFind.com (http://www.fuzzfind.com) that does this. Results are grouped together and sorted according to the search engine rankings plus the popularity of the sites according to the social bookmarking community.

There’s also a feature to allows you to tune and personalize the search results on-the-fly by simply adjusting the weight for each search source through the use of sliders.

Hope that you have some time to check it out, any feedback is welcome so that the service can be improved. Thanks!

The only thing that makes sense with this product is the mascot with the puffy cheeks… the mascot looks like it is about to blow and so does this search engine. It appears that the best way to rank in this POS is to have keywords in the URL.

I am not negative on this product because I don’t have any clients ranking in the system as I do see plenty of listings but I do see a recurring theme here of keyword based domains.

I tried to register but a page with no form is displayed. Looks like a long way for this project to go before people would start to use this over traditional search engines. For now it looks like another site the spammers can try to exploit.

I took it for a quick spin around the block.
I noticed my blog is number #1 for my primary term but my blog is a subdomain of my main website. My main website which ranks highly in all other engines was nowhere in the top 50.

Its a strange result, I’m thinking it works more based on XHTML CSS Validation than age of domain name, credibility and other factors.

That’s awesome that you’re showing respect to a project/company that has obviously stated that they will be competition (in a few more words), in the future.

I’m actually looking forward to seeing Wikia in Beta. So far, I’m really liking what I see. It’s just different, to say the least. I think it will be a pretty big hit. Google Killer? Far from it… but the demographics are surely going to differ, as well.

I checked it out, being that I’m currently doing SEO for a highly competitive area, Health Insurance, for my health insurance buyers book. Surprisingly, there wasn’t any spam (yet) on the mini article for health insurance. However, when I was trying to see examples of the mini articles, there were a number of spam-like postings. I don’t know how they’re going to be able to police the spam that people put up without an army of spam cops, but perhaps they know something about managing that type of content that I don’t.

Matt, though I am posting my comment for the first time but I am really impressed and happy to get this awesome information. I have visited this site ‘wikia’ and feel that this is a great site that would be helpful for the web community and the SE optimizers.

Being new in the industry of search engine marketing and optimization it makes me wonder by what standards the wikia site will set its search algorithm, I know Google is constantly changing theirs and will Wikia ever catch up.

A few industry buffs i have come across have said the site will one day it will match the power of google, this is going to be a nightmare for optimisers across the globe!

Being from the UK i can see SEM becoming a huge industry over here, its pretty big anyhow. Keep you the good work.

Mich, I feel the need to point out that googling != searching. As Merriam-Webster points out, to Google is “to use the Google search engine to obtain information about (as a person) on the World Wide Web.” Therefore, one would not Google me on Wikia or Microsoft. Maybe you would wikia me on wikia.com. 🙂 See here for more info: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/10/do-you-google.html

First:
As soon as the page loaded in front of me. I had to take a couple of seconds to figure out which was the text form field for search. The textbox looked like some table with a border. And then their ‘Go’ button is similar to their logo and their footer logo. That seems a little distracting when such uniformity is applied to a page with very little content.

Second:
I tried searching for ‘Google’. I had to wait for about 3seconds for the search results to load. Google’s search results load immediately on my laptop. And I got a few profile links on the right pane. Almost all links had an image with a text “No photo” text (not to mention, one of the images had the attributes as ‘ure worse then google’ and I am a Google lover). And worse, when I clicked on a profile link, it led me to a login page! Why would anyone use Wikia search when there’s Google that searches for free.